


The Nine Rules of the Maximoff Household

by ActuallyGirl



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Family Feels, Family Fluff, Gen, Parenting kids who can disobey the laws of physics and the space-time continuum, Parenting superhuman kids, Single parent trying to make it work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 08:40:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1934253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyGirl/pseuds/ActuallyGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were a couple of simple ground rules that everyone who lived in the Maximoff household had to oblige by. These, Magda told her children, were the unbreakable, unbending rules of their tiny universe and they should never ever stray from them. Ever. EVER. Except, they did, all the time. </p><p>Short story about the struggle of raising super-powered kids as a single parent. Slight DOFP-spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Nine Rules of the Maximoff Household

**Author's Note:**

> After seeing X-men Days of Future Past I've been a little bit obsessed with Peter's mom. Like how do you handle a hyper-active super-powered child that thinks he's invincible? And add to that having two other children to care for, and one of them can warp reality to their liking. How do you deal with that as a parent? I assumed strict ground rules would need to be set in place.
> 
> I'm using the movieverse-canon so I'm calling Pietro 'Peter'. I'm assuming the small child is Lorna (she's not Erik's because she's too young), and according to Singer, Wanda was supposed to be mentioned in the movie but that was cut out, so I'm assuming she exists as Peter's twin. I'm basically using the back-story of Magda Eisenheart from the comics except she didn't die or give the twins up.

There were a couple of simple ground rules that everyone who lived in the Maximoff household had to oblige by. These, Magda told her children, were the unbreakable, unbending rules of their tiny universe and they should never ever stray from them. Ever. EVER.

The rules were even written down in her neat handwriting and posted on the fridge for everyone to see. To an outsider, not knowing what went on inside that occasionally quiet suburban home, they looked quite normal and easy to uphold.

_Rule Number 1: No House Guests (unless they have been announced beforehand and approved by Mom.)_

That included playdates, people from school who came by to drop off homework, or the social workers, who seemed to be attracted to the Maximoff family like government moths to a flame. Anyone who showed up unannounced would not be allowed inside the house. A couple of years later when Peter was in his mid-teens Magda added an exception for police, since refusing them entry seemed to make them think she was hiding something. Which she was. But she didn't need them to know that.

_Rule Number 2: No Running in the House!_

A common rule by most standards and insanely hard to uphold for any family with energetic kids. For Magda it turned out to be an impossible rule to enforce and, she realized, a kind of cruel and unusual torture for her son the times he chose to obey. So, like the first rule, modifications were made.

_"No Running (as fast as you can) in the House"._

That at least kept the drapes from being dragged down by his draft whenever Peter decided to grab a snack. Which was around every 30 minutes.

Which led into rule three.

_Rule Number 3: No Unhealthy Snacks Between Meals_

Other mothers with teenage boys at one of Magda's three minimum-wage workplaces would complain about how their sons would just devour everything in the fridge three times a day. Magda often fantasized about calling them out on their bullshit, because of course  _their_  sons didn't  _literally_  empty the entire family food storage between school and dinnertime. But she never did.

However, forcing her son to go hungry was not an option either. Magda had not escaped poverty in Europe to have her son starve in the States. That's why she had added the 'unhealthy' part to the rule. Because snacks with sugar and fast carbs was far more expensive than other dull, more filling alternatives. Thus not ruining the family economy completely on a weekly basis.

In hindsight, mentioning the money-aspect of this to Peter had been a mistake as it started the long era of ill-gotten store goods appearing in the cabinets about 6 months later. Followed by their first visit from a police officer. Which lead to the addition of rule number four.

_Rule Number 4: No Helping Out with Money!_

Of course Magda would have LOVED if her kids decided to contribute to the household by going out and getting part time jobs, but that's not how they choose to try to help out financially. Instead, a large untraceable sum of money that no one could account for ended up on Magda's banking account. It almost got her into a fraud investigation before the money inexplicably disappeared again as if it never had been there. After that, she forbade her elder children to try to help out and for a while she had been a strict enforcer of rule 4.

But then came Lorna's fifth birthday when they couldn't afford a party. And her class trip which they of course couldn't pay for.  _And_  that time she ruined her winter jacket and Magda had to patch it horribly because there was no way to buy a new one that month.

Unless, of course, new tv-sets magically disappeared from stores and money teleported itself into her coat pockets which they had a tendency of doing. Magda couldn't find it in her heart to scold her children for being the only teenagers in existence to sneak money INTO their mother's purse to prevent their youngest sister from having to go to school looking like a drifter.

_Rule Number 5: Mom's Word is the Unquestionable Law of the Universe!_

The few visitors Magda had would always laugh at that one, smiling at her and saying "They are quite a handful, aren't they?" in what they believed to be a shared experience of raising unruly children. To any other parent this seemed like a normal, if strict, disciplinary procedure, along the lines of the more commonly known "My house - my rules" that other parents so frequently used.

Magda however simply thought writing "No re-writing the fabric of reality!" might lead to too many questions being asked by outsiders. In the Maximoff household, rule 5 would be utilized in phrases like "Get the furniture down from the ceiling  _right_   _now_ , young lady!" or "There will be  _no_  vanishing doors in  _my_  house!"

It was a rule that was, by its nature, almost impossible to uphold.

_Rule Number 6: Hand-holding Means Serious Business!_

Her few visitors never asked her about that one from fear of embarrassing Magda, as they believed the sentence was simply some mistranslation of a Romanian expression. Her English wasn't perfect, after all.

Of all the rules, this was the one Magda would not allow to be modified or broken in any way. When someone tried to grab Peter's hand, he was not allowed to withdraw it. And as long as he was being held, he needed to stay in one place and listen to whatever he was told. Of course, he could have easily ducked away or gotten free, but the women in the family were very stern about this rule being kept. Otherwise it was impossible to tell whether or not Peter had actually been there for the duration of the conversation. Originally it was Wanda's system set in place to deal with her brother which was probably why he abided by it with minimal fuss (which, by anyone else's standards, was a lot of fuss). Magda had also issued Wanda an addition to this rule, which was not to use it to torture her brother with. For example, needlessly dragging out conversations or speaking unnecessarily slow. Which she would occasionally do just to annoy him.

_Rule Number 7: In Case of Danger - Run_

Magda was a runner. She had successfully escaped the soldiers that took the rest of her family away, the country that hated her, and the United States of America's immigration officers for eight years. She was always ready to give up everything and get out at a moment's notice and she tried to pass that on to her children. Over and over again she had told them that if anything out of the ordinary happened (Wanda had in later years pointed out that 'out of the ordinary' was not a good point of measurement when it came to the Maximoff household), they should simply run.

This was repeated as a mantra along the lines of how other parents told their children not to take candy from strangers (Peter's favorite past time, especially if the stranger wasn't aware he was offering it). Sometimes she worried she might be making her children needlessly skittish, but after Peter and Wanda had grown into their powers she decided it was for the best even if it gave Lorna nightmares about being hunted.

Peter didn't worry about anyone coming to take him, no-one would believe what he could do anyway and if they did, he could run laps around them. But Magda and Wanda collectively got him to worry about Lorna. If anything happened, it was agreed that the twins should take Lorna and run, in case Magda had to stay to buy them time or they were separated.

"Mom. You're being crazy paranoid, Mom."

Peter talked even faster when he was forced into some sort of serious conversation and tended to repeat himself. Wanda was holding the sleeve of his shirt which meant no leaving or zipping about while Magda was explaining rule 7 to the twins. From the look on Peter's face he was in Hell.

"I could get you, Lorna, and Wanda to, like,  _Mexico_  by the time they've gotten from the curb to the front door," he continued rapidly.

"No you couldn't," Wanda said sharply.

"Totally could!"

"No, you idiot!" Wanda flipped her long hair out of her face with an annoyed gesture. "If you average around five seconds a mile, it would take you over two hours to Mexico!  _And_  you'd have to make five trips to get us all!"

"Wow, that sentence was, like, two hours." Peter stared at his twin for a quarter of a second before adding "Ner- _d_ ", popping the 'd'.

"Mom, Peter is being ignorant about geography and the laws of physics!"

"Mom, Wanda is being unnecessarily literal!"

"Stop it, both of you!" Magda snapped, eyeing them each in turn across the kitchen table. "Wanda, don't call your brother an idiot. Peter, don't be an idiot."

"Tell Wanda not to be a nerd!"

"Tell Peter to stop calling me a nerd!"

The twins objected in unison.

"No-one is a nerd but I'm thinking you're both idiots right now," Magda said sternly, taking another puff on her cigarette. Then she continued.

"I want you to promise me you'll do as I say if anything would ever happen."

"We're not exactly helpless, Mom."

Wanda sounded incredibly bored, but Magda knew her well enough to know if was a defense mechanism she used when something made her uncomfortable.

"I don't care what you  _can_  and  _can't_  do. You  _run_."

Magda put the cigarette in an ashtray and reached out to grasp both the twin's hands and held them as she continued.

"You both promise me that you take your sister and you get as far away from whatever it is as possible."

"But . . ." they both protested in chorus.

" _No_. You promise me. You run and you stick together. No matter what."

She had to fight to keep her tone calm and assertive and not think about her brother who didn't manage to outrun the soldiers. She emphasized the word one more time.

" _Promise_."

"Ok, fine, we promise! Cross our hearts and hope  _not_  to die," Peter shot off the words as if he couldn't get rid of them fast enough. "Can we  _go_  now?"

"We promise, Mom," Wanda replied and Magda noticed a tinge of worry in her voice. Good.

As the twins left, Peter annoying Wanda by messing up her hair as he swooshed by, Magda's chest swelled with love for her unruly children. They were good kids, no matter what the other mothers on the street thought of them. She had raised good, smart, capable kids who loved each other.

Magda had her own two secret rules, which she never wrote down because her elder children would simply roll their eyes and groan at them.

_Rule Number 8: Family is the most important thing in the world._

When Eric Lensherr appeared on television one evening, making claims about the future of man- and mutantkind, Magda was happy she had never written down that final rule for her kids to see. She looked at the back of Peters' head as he watched the television with uncharacteristic focus and silently repeated to herself. 'My kids are good kids. My kids are good kids.' No matter who their dads were, no matter how much of a screw-up Magda had been through her life, she had raised good kids. Of this, she was certain, because:

_Rule number 9: Believe in them - no matter what._


End file.
